I’m not a bad person, regardless of what you might have heard. I’m bright, intelligent, cultured, with a good (if sometimes weird) sense of humor, and a good friend to my friends. I’m often the “voice of wisdom” when my friends are feeling down for some reason, and they appreciate me for it – or so I like to think. I’m intellectually curious, and love to constantly learn new things. Some may say I lack modesty, to which I reply: “yes, and…?”, as I, much like Sherlock Holmes, believe modesty not to be a virtue at all (“to underestimate one’s self is as much a departure from truth as to exaggerate one’s own powers.”) I am, or at least try to be as much as I can, completely (and sometimes brutally) honest in all things. I also have a big (perhaps too big) sense of empathy, which can actually be harmful to me from time to time.

If the above seems conceited, I refer you to the aforementioned Sherlock Holmes quote. Besides, you haven’t heard the bad part yet. Honesty, after all, goes both ways.

The bad part is that I tend to be a coward. The most visible aspect of that is that I’m shy – as shy as you can imagine, if not more. I always tend to overanalyze things, to expect the worst, and to make up excuses for not even trying. This affects my relationships with other people the most, but also other parts of my life; it affects my self-confidence and my self-esteem. Because it’s so hard to overcome my fear and just try something, the rare times I manage to do so the fear is still visible, and I’m obviously not acting “naturally”. This affects many things in my life: looking at people in the eyes when talking to them, asking a woman on a date, talking naturally to people in a group, asking a boss for a raise, even going to a store to ask questions about a product. None of the above is natural to me, I make up all sorts of excuses to avoid doing them, and, when I do act, it feels (and looks) “artificial”. And it was even worse in the past; I’ve actually made progress in the past decade or so.

That cowardice is related to, and probably even one of the causes of, my second biggest fault: laziness. While I love solving problems, and have been known to stay up until the next morning solving a problem that fascinates me, or installing a new server at home, or playing a strategy videogame, I also tend to avoid most actual “work”, to avoid inconvenience and effort, to cut corners, and so on. This is why, for instance, I don’t have a university degree, and is one of the reasons bosses never “love” me, I’m never promoted, and never get a raise (here there are other reasons which are not my fault, one of them being my honesty; bosses love people who always look busy even if they have to pretend to be working, and I simply refuse to do that). This also makes me give my pets (cats and parrots) a lot less time than they deserve. And my home is, to put it bluntly, in chaos.

The combination of the above two have meant one thing: that I almost never see things to the end. This has harmed my life in myriad ways.

Those two are my main faults. Some minor ones include, for instance, the fact that I’m sometimes something of an elitist, but in a somewhat paradoxal way: on one hand, I tend to believe I’m smarter than most people, and on the other hand, I tend to expect everyone to be as capable as myself, and become surprised when told that they’re not. For instance, if I’m told someone is in danger of getting laid off, my first reaction is to ask, “why not learn new skills and get a better job?”, only to be told that, for many people, learning new skills is almost science fiction. This attitude of mine may appear snobbish to many people, when, to me, what I suggested is the most natural thing.

Oh, and I’m terribly impatient with incompetent, abusive drivers, which are the norm in Portugal, unfortunately. Few things can get me as furious as an idiot — who shouldn’t be allowed to drive a trycicle — putting my life, and those of any passengers in my car, in danger.

Goals:

In general, to become a better person. To overcome my stupid shyness, cowardice and laziness once and for all. To train my willpower to be able to do anything I want, to see it to the end, without quitting out of laziness or boredom. The fact that I will tell readers of this blog about what I’m doing, and what the results are, should act as an incentive for not giving up at the first obstacle.

Also, I should control my temper more, even though few things get me really mad. Unfortunately, they include something I have to face almost every day: Portuguese drivers. While I don’t think “tolerance” for potentially murderous attitudes is desirable, I should eventually prevent those morons from ruining my day.

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